25 June 2018 2:24 PM

The most spectacular example of democracy destroying liberty has always been a bit too powerful to be any use. The Third Reich is such an explosion of evil into the civilised world that many people see it as a sort of mystical, exceptional occasion, with no lessons for today.

There’s also the Godwin’s Law aspect of using this episode to settle any quarrel. The first person to introduce Hitler or the Nazis into any argument is automatically the loser of that argument, usually because it is disproportionate or silly as in ‘Hitler was against smoking, therefore people who oppose smoking are like Hitler’.

So, although National Socialist Germany came about through universal suffrage democracy (as moderated by the proportional representation which liberals are still very keen on) and was created entirely according to the most liberal constitution of its time ( a constitution never replaced during the 12 years of Hitlerite rule) nobody has ever publicly drawn any lessons from these facts.

Like much of the evidence against universal suffrage democracy – the elections without real choice, the supremacy of big money in campaigns, the frequent superiority of unelected chambers over elected ones, in terms of quality and independence, the nasty role of the whips in Parliament, the tendency of universal suffrage democracies to commit economic suicide rather than adopt sensible economic policies, it is something we prefer not to think about.

So I am not expecting much thinking to take place about the very frightening triumph, in elections at the weekend, of Turkey’s new Islamist despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Some doubt has been cast on the legitimacy of these polls. Personally I think that doubt may be justified. But Mr Erdogan’s power over his country’s media and courts is such that I very much doubt whether these questions will ever be properly investigated. The deed is done. He now combines the posts of head of government and head of state. And I do not think he will relax his furious process of gathering all power to himself.

Regular and longstanding readers here will know that I have been concerned about Mr Erdogan’s Turkey for some time. I made two visits there, trying and not altogether succeeding in understanding the direction in which Mr Erdogan was going (I was and remain puzzled by his foreign policy objectives, which may not actually have any real consistency. I was, I think, right that he was a menace to freedom, and that his ultimate objective is an Islamised country.

I do not think I shall return to Turkey, as I would not be sure that I would be safe there. Mr Erdogan has, in the past few years, almost entirely crushed opposition to him, mostly on the pretext of a failed putsch against him, an event about which I would like to know a good deal more.

Since then his already oppressive state has wiped out most of the remaining free media, and obtained the adoption, now complete, of a new constitution which makes Mr Erdogan terrifyingly powerful. Foreign journalists are by no means immune from his intolerance. I do not think he much likes criticism. So I fear I shall never again be able to visit the lovely and majestic Hagia Sophia, once the Church of the Holy Wisdom, now a museum , probably destined to be (as it was under the Ottomans) a mosque. Nor shall I be able to cross the Bosphorus, one of the most enjoyable ferry journeys in the world from Europe to Asia. I am glad that I managed to do while I had the chance.

With so many of his opponents ( a large number of them journalists) in prison, often after travesties of trials, and with civil society more or less crushed, he is in my view rather more unassailably powerful than Vladimir Putin is in Russia.

Interestingly Mr Erdogan said yesterday (during the suspect vote which made him the unchallenged supreme leader of the country) a ‘democratic revolution’, explaining ‘With the presidential system, Turkey is seriously raising the bar, rising above the level of contemporary civilisations’.

The ‘presidential system’ means that Mr Erdogan now rules from his large new palace unencumbered by a prime Minister, and that Turkey’s Parliament is a cypher.

So there it is, liberty and the rule of law, which never existed in post-Soviet Russia, Wiped out in Turkey, by universal suffrage democracy. Bizarrely and paradoxically, the only influences which could have stopped Erdogan becoming an Islamist superboss were the Armed Forces, whose power he finally broke after the failed putsch (which, as far as I can see, no significant general or admiral supported).

For many years western liberals praised Erdogan – the ‘Economist;’ magazine being especially keen to describe him as ‘moderately Islamist’ long after it was obvious that (to use his own metaphor) he had ridden the tram of democracy as far as it would take him, and had now abandoned it, climbing into the tank of autocracy in which he is finishing his journey.

And his NATO membership keeps them, to this day, from treating him with the special hostility they reserve for Vladimir Putin. How funny that Putin and Erdogan get on rather well, and that Erdogan’s worrying victory was swiftly welcomed by the unlovely Hungarian leader Viktor Orban (some western conservatives foolishly admire Mr Orban. They will come to wish they hadn’t, I suspect). https://thehungaryjournal.com/2018/06/25/orban-first-eu-leader-to-congratulate-erdogan/

But all these are details. The real thing is this: Democracy has, in this case, directly destroyed liberty, as I suspect it will increasingly do in this era of failed liberalism, not to mention the growth of Chinese power and the existence of an economically successful despotic world power. How can people continue to think and speak and act as if democracy and freedom are the same thing?

And if they are not how, if at all, ae we supposed to defend freedom and the rule of law form people such as Mr Erdogan?

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02 October 2017 11:38 AM

I am ceaselessly accused of being an apologist for Islam because I point out that fact that many rampage killers, Islamic or otherwise, are long-term users of mind-altering drugs. It happeend again this morning.

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My correspondent Val Hayes has rightly pointed out to me that my ban from the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme did not immediately follow my brush with Professor Nutt, and the Feedback show trial in November 2010, and dates only from August 2012. He has found the following clips of appearances between 2010 and 2012, some of which I had entirely forgotten.

I can't explain what happened. I presume that there were people on the programme who still wanted to have me on and that they were gradually overborne. These clips certainly back up my own memory that I was a reasonably frequent (and effectively articulate) guest on 'Today' until quite recently, and hat invitations mysteriously dried up. The internal politics of the programme are a mystery to me, but it certainly seems to me to have grown much duller and more consensual since the beginning of the Coalition

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20 August 2017 1:20 PM

How Many Times Do I Have to Say it?

I am not defending Islam, And I am not saying there is a single cause for rampage killings.

This interesting posting (with emphases added) from Monday 7th December 2015 shows that I have been repeatedly making this clear for months. Yet I am still being accused of these things in comments posted today.

'....The other is the San Bernardino shooting, in which 14 people died and 21 were injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This event was initially reported simply as a gun massacre, but has since been ‘nationalised’, as Sir Simon Jenkins says, by being classified by President Obama as a terror outrage. Is this wise or useful?

Well, maybe. I keep an open mind on all such claims, though continue to insist on testable actual evidence of terrorist connections and motive, rather than unsourced claims and the whisperings of security men and their media patsies, before accepting that they are in any way centrally directed. There’s also the usual talk of ‘radicalisation’, a speculation that doesn’t explain how even the wildest ideas translate themselves (as they do so rarely) into violent action.

The possibility that we may be dealing with unhinged people, not in full command of themselves, has been pushed into the background by the current preoccupation with Islamic State, which has now wholly replaced the (largely mythical) Al Qaeda, as the Official Octopus of global terror. This of course means nobody is looking into how they might have become unhinged, preferring to trawl through their travel, phone and computer records in the hope of finding some link between Raqqa and San Bernardino, just as we once sought similar links between every terror outrage in the world and an imaginary cave in Afghanistan.

Islamic State does certainly exist in Syria and Iraq, but I think we must be free to doubt how closely its distant franchises are linked to the central body. Also, if Islamic State wishes to strike at the USA, why would it choose to do so at a centre for the developmentally disabled in Southern California? I’ve struggled to learn much about the row Farook and Malik appear to have had with another guest at the party at the centre, before leaving to fetch their guns and bombs. Such things, surely interesting to any crime investigator searching for motive, get lost once ‘terror’ is the explanation.

This opens : ‘Spilt across their cluttered kitchen counter was the last meal enjoyed by Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook. Along with orange juice and paratha bread were bottles of Adderall and Xanax pills, prescribed to steady the nerves.’

Who says they were ‘prescribed to steady the nerves’? Who knows that they were prescribed at all? Who says this was their purpose? Maybe an interview with the doctor involved was cut out at the last minute, but this seems to me like jumping to conclusions. Maybe the pills were prescribed. But the misuse of Xanax is not exactly unknown. This amazing piece of presupposition allows the story to wander off immediately into all kinds of other directions.

What is Xanax, otherwise known as ‘alprazolam’? Why, it’s a member of the happy, happy benzodiazepine family. Look it up. Adverse effects include suicidal ideation, our old friend. And its ‘paradoxical reactions’ (that is, those you might not expect from a drug marketed as a tranquillizer) are aggression, rage , hostility, twitches and tremor, mania, agitation, hyperactivity and restlessness.

As for Adderall, this is an amphetamine, of all things, mainly prescribed to children alleged to be suffering from the mythical complaint, ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or its equally phantasmal relative ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’. No objective diagnosis has ever been established for these complaints yet they are ‘treated’ with powerful mind-altering drugs. Amphetamines are totally banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in almost all jurisdictions.

Malik and Farook had a six-month old baby, but even American ADHD/ADD fanatics have yet (I think) to begin prescribing their ‘medications’ to children so young. So we have to wonder what it was doing in their home. I know there is an increasing habit of 'diagnosing' adults with ADD, the child market having become saturated, but some of these drugs leak out of the legal market

Very high doses can result in psychosis, involving delusions and paranoia. A Wikipedia article says ‘Recreational doses are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious side effects’.

Interestingly, its use is contraindicated in people suffering from severe anxiety, the same people who might be prescribed Xanax.

I mention these things here, and place them in a proper context, for reasons well-known to regular readers. There appears to be a reliable correlation between outbreaks of homicidal violence (including violence classified as political) and the use of mind-altering drugs, whether legal or illegal. If we don’t investigate it, we will never find out of it is important.

Please don’t tell me I’m trying to excuse crimes, or take the heat off Islamist fanaticism. I am not. Not merely have I not said that I am, which ought to be enough for anyone short of the Thought Police. I am here saying that I have no such motive. Please don’t tell me I’m offering a single cause. I am not.

Got that?

Now try this

He wasn't No Terrorist, Bruv - reflections on the Leytonstone Knife Outrage

Back in December there was an extraordinary and disturbing incident at Leytonstone Underground Station in London. I noted briefly in my column of 13th December 2015: ‘THIS is all I'll say about this because it seems to me the facts are so devastating. But in all three recent cases of dangerous public violence, yet again, mind-­altering drugs are involved. Robert Dear, suspect in the killings in Colorado Springs, was a cannabis user. The flat of the culprits in the San Bernardino shooting, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, contained bottles of a benzodiazepine - whose 'paradoxical reactions' include rage, hostility, aggression and mania - plus amphetamines, which can produce delusions and paranoia. And the alleged culprit of the Leytonstone knife attack, Muhaydin Mire, was a normal young man until he started smoking cannabis, after which he became mentally ill. Please may we have an inquiry into this correlation?’

I shall now say more. The marijuana element was quite specific (as it was in the Rigby murder, as I have often pointed out, and several other incidents classified as terrorist) . The Times of London had reported on 9th December ‘The alleged attacker's brother, Mohamed, said that he had been treated for cannabis-related "mental health issues" in 2007, but that he started behaving oddly only after finishing as an Uber driver last summer.’ The Daily Telegraph had reported on 8th December : ‘THE family of the terror suspect accused of the London Underground knife attack raised concerns to police three weeks ago over his mental health, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

‘Relatives of Muhaydin Mire, 29, had growing fears over his behaviour and asked the Metropolitan Police whether officers needed to intervene, it is understood. Last night Scotland Yard admitted it had been in contact with a family member before Mire allegedly knifed a passenger at Leytonstone Underground station, shouting "this is for Syria".

‘The family is understood to have told officers they wanted Mire committed under the Mental Health Act.

‘Mire's brother, Mohamed, said last night: "He was saying odd things, talking nonsense and saying that he was seeing demons." However, the Met Police attempted to defend their lack of intervention, claiming in a statement sent to The Daily Telegraph that "there was no mention of radicalisation".

‘The statement said: "The police were contacted by a family member approximately three weeks before the incident on Saturday. There was no mention of radicalisation; the conversation related entirely to health related issues and the family were therefore correctly referred to health services for help." Mire has been interviewed by mental health specialists and is undergoing assessments while awaiting a court appearance at the Old Bailey.

‘Mohamed Mire told how his brother came to Britain when he was 12 from Somalia and went to school in Camden, north London.

‘"He was a good boy and he loved football. As far as I know he loved education, he wanted to be a computer scientist," he told Channel 4 News. "It didn't work out for him. He got in with the wrong people." He said that his brother developed mental health problems after smoking cannabis: "He was diagnosed by a doctor and treated in 2007 for paranoia and [treated] in hospital for three months." Mohamed said that his brother had been working as an Uber driver, but in August this year his mental health worsened once again.

‘He said: "He went a bit crazy, he was saying odd things. I explained to the family the situation, we tried to get him help, we tried to call the local authority. They could not help him. We tried to tell them - this guy has mental issues, can you at least section him. I talked to the police. And then I decide to move him out of the country, so I called my mum [who lives in Somalia] and she told me to take him out the country to help him out. So I decide to book tickets for him this Sunday."’

The Daily Mirror of the same day reported ‘His brother Mohamed said the Uber taxi driver had mental health problems but authorities "could not help him because he wasn't a harm to people".

‘Mohamed said: "He was saying odd things, talking nonsense and saying that he was seeing demons."

‘He claimed his brother started smoking cannabis and in 2007 was diagnosed and treated for paranoia in hospital for three months.

‘But he said Mire's mental health worsened in August. Mohamed went on: "He went a bit crazy, he was saying odd things. I explained to the family the situation, we tried to get him help, we tried to call the local authority. They could not help him. We tried to tell them, 'This guy has mental issues, can you at least section him?' I talked to the police."’

And added: ‘Last night Scotland Yard admitted it had been in contact with a family member before the stabbing. A Met Police statement said: "The police were contacted by a family member approximately three weeks before the incident on Saturday."There was no mention of radicalisation; the conversation related entirely to health-related issues and the family were therefore correctly referred to health services for help." ‘(my emphasis).

The incident was widely treated as a fundamentally terrorist episode originating in political or religious fervour. Much was made of a passer-by who had called at Mire ‘You ain’t no Muslim, Bruv!’. This person was praised by the prime Minister, presumably for demonstrating something most intelligent people knew already – that most Muslims aren’t terrorists and don’t have any plans to slit our throats.

But in today’s papers, (9th June 2016) which reported the conviction of Mire for attempted murder, things were a bit more confused.

While none of them (as far as I can find) mentioned Mire’s cannabis habit, the Daily Telegraph noted, very oddly: ‘…a British police chief warned that Isil was deliberately encouraging (my emphasis) people with mental illnesses to carry out terror attacks, after a man suffering from psychosis was convicted of trying to behead a Tube passenger.’

This is a strange thing to say. I myself would love to know how Isil, Isis, Daesh, so-called whatever, was doing this deliberate targeting. Is it transmitting to them on those special wavelengths which crazy people believe are always giving them instructions? Are we in the world of tinfoil hats?

Well, I’m not sure, because you also need to read this account in The Guardian

‘The Guardian understands that Mire was not on any database of suspects or known extremists, and is not believed to have been exploited by any known terrorist group or individual.’(My emphasis).

And:

‘Despite police initially classing it as a terrorist incident, there was no meeting of the government’s crisis committee, Cobra, which has convened after other terrorist attacks, nor statements from the prime minister. Mire is believed to have acted alone, and there is no evidence he acted under direction or as part of any network.(My emphasis).

‘After the verdict, police said they no longer classed Mire’s actions as terrorism. Cdr Dean Haydon, head of counter-terrorism for Scotland Yard, said: “I would not class it as a terrorist incident now.” (My emphasis)

‘Haydon said the attack was not politically motivated but down to Mire’s mental illness. (My emphasis).The attacker had been inspired by Isis propaganda, which posed a danger to the vulnerable.

Haydon said it had been right to treat the attack as potentially terrorist at the start because of words uttered by Mire, such as “Allahu Akbar”, and his comments about Syria. That impression was buttressed by the material detectives found on his phone.

‘But subsequent inquiries did not support Mire’s actions being part of a political, religious or ideological cause, which is the definition of terrorism. (my emphasis) Nonetheless, Haydon said Mire had been inspired by Isis material he downloaded on to his phone to commit violence.

“Whilst Mire has not been accused of any terrorist offences, it would appear from comments he made at the time of the attack and the content he had downloaded on his phone that he may have been inspired by extremist ideology,” he said.

“Part of their propaganda is specifically targeted in relation to the vulnerable. We’re not just talking about mental health here, we’re talking about vulnerable individuals within the community. As a result of what I would call inspiration as a result of that propaganda, we are seeing more and more lone actors. Spontaneous volatile extremists is another term.”

‘Mire had a history of mental illness and was experiencing paranoid delusions a month before the attack. He had missed an appointment with a community mental health team four days before the incident on 5 December 2015.

‘I think this is having it both ways and neither. The police attitude mingles unequivocal statements that Mire was not part of a political, religious or ideological cause. Then it veers into saying that he may been ‘inspired by extremist ideology’.’

If he was ‘spontaneous’ how can he also have been influenced? Don’t we all know that mentally ill people attach themselves to religious and political movements – but that by doing so they do not suddenly obtain rational motives for their actions, merely a more grandiose form of expression, which they might equally well have found in anything else that came to hand? Islamic State propaganda may well have reached Mire’s mind. But had he not been mentally ill this would not have impelled him to attack a total stranger with a breadknife in a London Tube station. Mental illness, following heavy drug abuse, was behind that. Perhaps if this were better understood, and we were not so focused on terrorism as the main threat, the authorities might have paid more attention to Mire’s family when they begged for an intervention three weeks before the crime.

Some idiot will here attempt to suggest that I am trying to excuse or minimise the role of Islamist fanaticism in terror. That idiot always does, and nothing I can say will stop him. But this is quite false. I have no possible interest in doing so. My interest is in noting the very remarkable correlation between violent incidents, classified as terrorist and therefore subject to unusual scrutiny, and the use of mind-altering drugs by their culprits.

Once again, let me explain that I am not saying that all terrorists use mind-altering drugs (though I think many do). Nor am I suggesting that all users of mind-altering drugs are terrorists. So don’t write to me as if I had said either of these things which I have not merely not said but specifically stated that I have not said.

I am saying that in this subset of violent crime, in which the media take an unusually detailed interest, we find that the culprits are often mentally ill and often users of mind-altering drugs. This suggests that it would be wise to investigate all culprits of violent crime to discover how strong this correlation is.

This was not by any stretch connected with terrorism or Daesh. Instead, the supposed solution is to make knives harder to get hold of, an enterprise which I fear has little chance of success. Yet only one story mentions the culprit’s use of *synthetic* cannabis, though it is noted that he had been mentally ill for years. I was more or less sure when I first heard of this event that the culprit would turn out to be a) mentally ill and b) a drug abuser. I think I can also say that, if anyone looks into his past, his mental illness was preceded by regular use of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug, cannabis. But as he is not a terrorist, such inquiries are unlikely to be made.

Got that?

Try this:

Is the latest mass murder really 'incomprehensible'?

***NB: the following article would be about half its length if I didn’t have to idiot-proof it with long explanations of why I am not saying various things which I am not saying, and don’t think. Sorry, but that’s the modern world.***

I see the new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, has described the mass murder in the South of France as ‘incomprehensible’. I challenge this view here. I believe that, like many similar horrors in Europe and North America, these events may well be both comprehensible and, if not wholly preventable, then certainly capable of being diminished.

Over the weekend I got the strong impression (on Twitter) that many people would rather have an enemy to fear than an explanation of crimes such as the Nice massacre.

An enemy is simple. An enemy allows ourselves to reassure ourselves by giving more power to the vaunted (but in my view costly and futile ) ‘security services’. It also allows us to believe bogeyman stories about ‘training camps’ and instructions issued to carefully planted agents from the sinister depths of Iraq or Syria by bearded, turbanned supervillains.

But we are not thinking very hard about this. As I have many times pointed out, the common factor in almost all these killings (and I say ‘almost only because in some cases the evidence has not been investigated or is - bizarrely and suspiciously - sealed) is mind-altering drugs of three types:

Psychiatric medication (as evidenced, for instance, in the Columbine and San Bernardino episodes, and in a Finnish school shooting, and possibly present in Nice);

marijuana, as evidenced (for example) in Tucson, Paris (Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan), Brussels, Tunisia, Ottawa, in the Lee Rigby murder and aboard the Thalys train, and certainly in Nice;

and steroids, as used (for example) by Anders Breivik, by the British criminal Raoul Moat and most recently by the Orlando mass-murderer Omar Mateen. A post-mortem recently confirmed steroids, which his first wife said he took, were present in Mateen’s body at the time of the massacre. In Breivik’s case, the authorities remain totally uninterested in this aspect of the case, and we only know of his steroid use from his own revolting and moronic ‘testament’.

I have tried to discover if there are any such links in the case of Micah Johnson, culprit of the Dallas massacre. The Dallas police , when I asked them last week, did not even seem aware of this link between mind-altering drugs and rampage killings, and had not, so far as I could discover, sought to investigate it. This lack of urgent official interest is a major problem in all such episodes. I have yet to hear further from them.

Yet we know from Johnson’s mother that his personality changed after his spell of military duty in Afghanistan, and we also know that he was sacked from the US military after some seriously strange harassment of a (female) fellow-soldier. The victim said she wanted Johnson to receive ‘mental help’ and, as I understand the US military is quite happy for its soldiers to be prescribed psychiatric ‘medication’. I have seen nothing yet to suggest an illegal drug habit. But then there is no reason why I should have done. In the modern USA, contrary to myths spread by the Big Dope lobby, marijuana is semi-legal, especially thanks to ‘medical marijuana’ laws (Even supposedly ultra-conservative Texas introduced such a law last year, and such laws are usually preceded by a long period of police laxity, during which prosecutions or other records are rare), so it would not exactly be a shock to discover that he was a user.

***

Now to Mohamed Bouhlel, the perpetrator of the massacre-by-lorry in Nice. I note that the French security apparatus, and French politicians, are now floundering around trying to argue that he is in fact an Islamist militant, after his neighbours and relatives rather failed to back up this narrative in their descriptions of him at the weekend. One has to ask why they are so anxious to grasp at the ‘Islamic extremism’ explanation, even when so much evidence is against it.

The most concise summary of his life and times, irritatingly, appeared in ‘the Times’ on Saturday and is behind a pay wall.

But I will provide some extracts from it, including the headline ‘Weird Loner who took drugs and beat up his wife’ , and the accompanying heading to a neighbouring report ‘Killer an atheist, says brother’

‘Bouhlel… was a Tunisian native described as more interested in drink and drugs than religion. He had a conviction for assault and had been reported to police for beating up his wife. He ‘was not known to the anti-terrorist police as a Muslim extremist’

‘In March he was given a suspended six-month prison sentence after getting into a fight with a motorist whom he threatened with a crate. Officials said that he was well known to police, having been suspected of violence and theft on at least five occasions’ . ‘"Everyone around here knew he beat [his wife]," a neighbour said. "

[His wife’s] cousin, Walid Hamou, said: "Bouhlel was not religious. He did not go to the mosque, he did not pray, he did not observe Ramadan. He drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. He was not a Muslim, he was a s***. He beat his wife, my cousin, he was a nasty piece of work,"

The killer’s brother, Gaber Lahouaiej, speaking from Tunisia, said :Mohamed wasn’t religious, he never fasted or prayed, he was an atheist…he never had any relation to terrorist groups’.

Wissam, another neighbour, said: "He was someone who drinks and smokes joints. On Thursday he went drinking with a colleague who told him 'You're worthless'. He answered 'One day you're going to hear about me'." … Bouhlel also practised body building at a gym (PH asks : Could he have been taking steroids, as so many body-builders do?).

Are we supposed to think that all these neighbours and relatives, whose accounts tally so closely, are 'Alky Ada'( as Gordon Brown used rather touchingly to call 'Al Qaeda) operatives lying their heads off in the hope of fooling the West? Don’t be silly. It is worth considering the possibility that they are just honest people, telling the truth, which doesn’t fit the obsessions of our politicians and media.

I have appended below some other accounts which are helpful, and show that Bouhlel was almost certainly mentally ill for some time before the episode, and probably prescribed psychiatric ‘medication’ . His neighbour, Wissam, unequivocally described him to reporters (and on a TV news clip I have been unable to recover so far) as a smoker of ‘hashish’ and as a bicycle thief. He was also a wife-beater and came to the attention of police for other acts of violence. I hope no readers of the weblog are still labouring under the belief that marijuana is a ‘peaceful’ drug. As I have often said, the correlation between its use and crimes of unhinged violence is strong. We know this because such crimes, whether ‘terrorist’ in Europe or committed by ‘gun maniacs’ in the USA receive close attention, and the drug use of the perpetrators is often revealed. This is not the case in most reporting of crime, and of course a lot of supposedly ‘petty’ violence goes entirely unreported in the media, so we cannot study it.

But the correlation revealed in this special subset of crimes is so strong that an inquiry into this correlation is long overdue. Once again, please do not accuse me of saying things I do not say, so as to avoid what I *do* say. The subject is too important for such silliness. The longer we neglect this problem, the more lives will be needlessly lost. I am not trying to excuse Islamic terrorists. I do not say all drugtakers are terrorists. I do not say all terrorists are drugtakers. Got that now? Good.

This is all that I am saying, that there should be an inquiry into this correlation between mind-altering drugs and acts of mass murder. I draw no conclusions. I haven’t enough information to do so. I make no generalisations about terrorists, drugs, or crime. I do not seek to excuse militant Islam from any crimes it foments. I just believe its importance is overstated, and that, where it is plainly not a factor, as in school shootings in Finland and Germany, or in the mass-killing of his passengers by the German Wings pilot Andreas Lubitz (heavily drugged with ’antidepressants’) it is dismissed as an individual episode beyond explanation, or passed over with far less fuss than is devoted to killings where the perpetrators are Muslims, or might be Muslims.

Likewise, I believe the importance of the USA’s gun laws is overstated in the reporting of, and reaction to, rampage killings in that country. If these 200-year-old laws were so decisive then why did such killings only begin to take place in the last 50 years?

For, on the other side of the Atlantic, oddly, exactly the same sort of event is invariably explained by the Second Amendment to the US constitution, and the relaxed gun laws which result from it. This isn’t only because most of the perpetrators of such outrages in the USA are *not* Muslims. It’s because there’s a very vocal media and political campaign for gun control, which takes opportunities where it finds them.

Likewise the ‘Muslim bogeyman’ response in Europe (which has no Second Amendment, where gun laws are generally strict and where it has been demonstrated that a motor vehicle is just as lethal as a gun in the hands of a person evilly disposed or unhinged enough to use it in this way) is driven by securocrats who want more money and more powers for their interminable struggle against nebulous Islamic plots.

By the way, the old saying ‘When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at his finger’ has never seemed more apt than it has done while dealing (mainly on Twitter) with scores of correspondents who accused me of being a Muslim apologist for suggesting that Bouhlel’s motivation (if becoming unhinged can be described as a motivation) was anything other than Muslim fundamentalism.

Readers here will of course know that I am not an apologist for Islam. No Christian can be, not least because Islam actively denies some of the key propositions of my faith. But this reaction is an extraordinary example both of impenetrable groupthink and of dead-headed circular thinking.

If a man cannot be bothered to worship Allah, if he cannot be bothered to observe the basic dietary requirements of his supposed faith, then how likely is it, really, that he will die for that faith?

I know the standard circular answer to this (given by those who seem to want Islam to be the explanation). It is that allegedly such a death would redeem him. But you would have to believe very deeply that this was so, to seek to take advantage of it. And if his belief is so weak that he breaks all the precepts of Islam, why should he believe that one thing so deeply, and the rest not at all?

*****

For a reasoning person, it is fascinating that the response to these events in Europe and the USA (though the events are essentially the same), is driven in two different jurisdictions by two wholly different lobbies. In Europe, that lobby is principally the security services who want more powers of surveillance and control. In the USA the lobby is one which wishes to disarm the American people.

I will leave it to you to work out why such lobbies should be so dominant, and why there are, somehow, no lobbies against the widespread use of cannabis or calling for inquiries into the ‘side-effects’ of psychiatric drugs.

In the meantime , we are perhaps uncomfortable with the idea that a near neighbour of ours, utterly uninfluenced by Daesh or by ‘Alky Ada’, could one day get it into his head to slaughter scores of his fellow creatures. Or perhaps we just like simple stories, served up to us by cliché-minded anchormen and women on rolling news channels.

Touching, perhaps, but not good. Those who viewed the Libya war, and the overthrown of Muammar Gaddafi, as a kind of ‘good versus evil’ drama, are in my view partly responsible for the catastrophe which followed. Without their goonish, nodding approval, politicians such as A.C.L. Blair and David Cameron could not have got or could not get parliamentary support for these ill-considered adventures. If we were more sceptical, we would be much safer, and Europe would not now be trying and failing to deal with one of the biggest movements of people in human history, as the Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syrian adventures show. If Islam presents a challenge to our civilisation, it is in this form, of mass migration, that it does so - not through random acts of murder.

What Do We Know About the Paris Outrages?

I thought I would try to tot up what we know about the Paris murderers. We know what they did. We presume we know why they did it. But are we right to treat Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly as a co-ordinated unit? And if not, what did motivate them?

I would stress that I do not claim to know. What follows is simply interested speculation, informed by my own known views on this subject. I offer it for discussion and examination, not as a solution. Our knowledge is imperfect, and may always remain so, since the main actors in this horror are dead.

Their own various claims seem to me to mean little. Why should such people be assumed to be telling the truth about themselves, in the middle of a crime? Claims of membership made either by them or by various organisations are uncheckable and could easily be empty boasting.

And are we right to treat them as highly-organised and trained jihadis? And what about Hayat Boumedienne, wife of Coulibaly, niqab-clad crossbow-wielder etc? She is now reported to have been in Turkey, presumed to be on her way to Syria, before the outrage took place. Reuters have reported :’The suspected female accomplice of Islamist militants behind attacks in Paris was in Turkey five days before the killings and crossed into Syria on January 8th, [Turkish]Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday by the state-run Anatolian News Agency as saying.’

Those dates would put Boumedienne in Turkey before the violence in Paris began, leaving for Syria while the attackers were still on the loose.

In the first days of any event such as this, reporters struggle to get hard information, rumours and unconfirmed reports rush through the air. It is very difficult to get reliable facts. I understand this. The first proper acccounts of the Septeebr 11th 2001 massacre did not emerge for a long time after the event. Much is still secret or 'redacted, nearly 14 years later.

But there’s also, it seems to me, a bit of a desire to find a pattern, one which makes the events fit the idea (common in governments, security services and newsrooms) that we face a co-ordinated Islamist conspiracy against our ‘way of life’, wich can be countered by increased surveillance, restrictions on liberty, and greater so-called 'security'.

The alternative, that most European capitals now contain an underclass of chaotic mentally unstable drifters, drug abusers and petty criminals, sometimes employed in dead-end jobs such as pizza delivery, sometimes not, whose empty lives can, alas, be given meaning by Islamic utopianism, is less explored. It’s less exciting. It gives much less support to lobbies for ‘tough’ laws, ‘crackdowns’ and surveillance. I think it should be considered. Careful, attentive policing of these parts of society might yield more than any amount of crackdowns and surveillance on the rest of us.

This, by the way is *not* precisely the same argument which I apply to the ‘lone wolf’ attacks of Woolwich, Sydney and Ottawa.

The Paris murderers can more properly be referred to as ‘terrorists’, though Coulibaly less so than the others, because his initial crime – the random shooting of a jogger at Fontenay-aux-Roses - was so utterly wanton. His later murders of hostages were likewise acts of utter stupid cruelty, not even explicable by the fanatics’ own perverted code. (Note to would-be twisters and misrepresentation merchants: I am not, by saying this, excusing or condoning more politically purposeful murders. I am simply making a distinction between different types of despicable, indefensible crime, because I think that distinction may one day help us prevent similar outrages).

When Coulibaly murdered a policewoman at Montrouge, which might in his twisted mind have had a political or religious purpose, he also shot a roadsweeper in the face, leaving him critically injured (I have been unable to learn more details of his fate) . That action (like the shooting of the jogger, linked to Coulibaly by bullet casings found at the scene (though the victim says his assailant wasn’t Coulibaly) is inexplicable by any political or religious creed, and cannot have been connected to or ‘synchronised with’ the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor done in response to alleged ‘orders’ by any supposed terrorist High Command.

It is just random, moronic, inexcusable,cruel violence. Given the unending possibility of my being misrepresented by my critics, I must point out once more, quite explicitly, that my selection of these crimes for special mention is not aimed at in any way excusing or lessening the condemnation of the more obviously political crimes against journalists or Jews.

I mention them because , like the Kouachis’ initial attempt to enter the wrong building in their attack on Charlie Hebdo, and their shooting of a maintenance worker when they first entered the building, and their failure (for which we must be grateful) to kill all those they found in the editorial office, they suggest that we are dealing with not-especially-competent or well-trained killers, who have not properly planned their crime or prepared their escape.

We must also be pleased that one of the brothers was so incompetent at terrorist crime that he actually left his identity card in the car they abandoned. What sort of terrorist ‘training’ would leave someone able to do this, I am not sure. It cannot be very thorough. I do not know how much longer the French authorities would have taken to track them down without this clue. One expects that fingerprints, or CCTV images, or purchase records will eventually allow police to track culprits down. But an actual identity card in the getaway car! This discovery may have saved days.

It is quite clear from the reports that both Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly had been in contact with Islamist preachers of various kinds, and one or both Kouachis travelled at least once to the Yemen though there is less information about what exactly they got up to there.

I do get a bit exasperated with all this talk of terrorist ‘training camps’. Once you’ve mastered the use of a gun (and a distressing number of modern petty criminals have done this quite easily), no particular ‘training’ is required to murder defenceless journalists, or indeed to kill unprepared police officers taken by surprise. Training would be required to confront professional soldiers. But almost any fool can kill a defenceless human being, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, which terrorists almost always do.

You have to be in some kind of abnormal circumstance, eitehr externally imposed or internally driven, to kill a stranger in cold blood. This isn’t at all to excuse such acts. People still know such killings are evil, and that they shouldn’t do them. The question is, how they persuade themselves that, in this particular case, it’s justified. If they’re drug abusers (again, no excuse, this is a voluntary act with known consequences) , their senses may be so dulled and their minds so clouded with hallucinations, persecution mania and phantom voices that they do not fully grasp the horror of what they are doing.

Evidence now suggests that this was the case with Michael Adebowale, one of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby . I have noted before that we know for certain that Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor. A psychiatrist found him 'paranoid and incoherent', and said his symptoms were worsened by 'heavy use of cannabis'.

This may have been the case with other terrorist killers in recent incidents, and also with some non-terrorist killers whose crimes, though non-political, were similarly horrific. But a general lack of interest in this aspect, in the police and the media, means that we do not have enough information to say. Hence, in my view, the need for more curiosity about this problem. (Note for Ben Goldacre: by ‘curiosity’ I mean that police and media should routinely inquire into the drug habits of suspects and culprits in cases of violence, terrorist and non-terrorist. And no more).

Fanaticism can certainly do this, especially one which allows the killer to think that his victims are not fully human, But some other source of unreason is more than likely. The combination of fanaticism and drug abuse is plainly particularly dangerous. But, given the layers of society, in Britain and France, from which terrorist killers are drawn, fanaticism will in many cases be allied with drug abuse.

I have found no reports of previous blatantly irrational or unhinged behaviour by any of the killers, though some of Coulibaly’s criminal record and his actions during his final murders seem to me to suggest a person not wholly in charge of his own actions. Again, note that this is not an excuse. His previous life, a very wicked one, had led him to this point and he had chosen that course.

Of Cherif Kouachi we know that he was arrested in 2005 on the way to Iraq via Syria. His lawyer insists that he did not actually want to go and was glad to be caught. In prison (where, on the Continental system, he spent more time in pre-trial detention than he did serving his sentence) he met Coulibaly, though no doubt he also met plenty of other people and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the meeting was particularly significant.

The ‘radical preacher’ under whose influence he allegedly fell, Farid Benyettou, discouraged him from attacks on Jews saying that France was ‘not a land of jihad’.

Court records show Cherif Kouachi said he didn't consider himself a good enough Muslim, and said he had only been to the mosque two or three times before he met Benyettou, and he had been smoking cannabis.

Said Kouachi, Cherif’s elder brother, was in Yemen in 2009, and there shared a flat with Abdulmutallab, attempted bomber of Northwest Flight 253, ‘for one or two weeks’. It is hard to tell whether this is significant. ‘Intelligence officials’ quoted in various stories say he went to Yemen again in 2011 for terror training. The source is an unnamed US official quoting an unnamed French intelligence source. But the French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told Christiane Amanpour in an on-the-record TV interview that one brother travelled to Yemen in 2005. Oddly, she would not say which one.

Here are one or two interesting notes about the culprits.

‘Orphaned at a young age, they [The Kouachi brothers] drifted into a life of smoking drugs, petty offending and rap music ‘ , Cherif had a ‘minor criminal record’

Said Kouachi was ‘ …the only one of the three who had not been in prison in France. But he had been questioned by police and released over the Buttes-Chaumont jihadi cell in 2005. Yemeni security officials confirmed that he had spent several months in the country, was suspected of having fought for al-Qaida and was probably among a group of foreigners deported from Yemen in 2012. Both brothers were on US and UK no-fly lists.

On Amedy Coulibaly:

He had a criminal record “The first case was the armed robbery of a sports clothing shop. It stood out because his getaway car was in an accident and rolled off a bridge, but Coulibaly nonetheless got out of the car, badly bruised, and went straight back to school where he just sat down and got on with his class.” This does not suggest a particularly organised or co-ordinated individual.

A lawyer, Damien Brossier later defended him for an armed bank robbery. “There was a mad-dog element about him,” he said. “He was friendly, he was not unpleasant, he wasn’t hard to talk to, there wasn’t a tension. One created a superficial relationship with him.”

Coulibaly served another prison term for a drugs offence before training to be a television fitter, settling in Grigny, back in the south of Paris. (Times 10/01). He has a record of small drugs and theft offences. One of 10 children and the only boy, Coulibaly became a delinquent at 17 and a repeat offender for petty thefts and drugs crimes

Coulibaly said at 3pm (to a radio station) that he had already killed four people in his attack on the supermarket - suggesting that the final assault by police was relatively successful. He also said that he had worked "in synchronisation” with the Charlie Hebdo killers. He claimed to be working for Isis. Kouachi said that he was "sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen".

Is that clear?

Then try this :

25 murders and massacres, one common link... DRUGS

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

At one point a few days ago I feared to turn on the radio or TV because of the ceaseless accounts of blood, death and screams, one outrage after another, which would pour out of screen or loudspeaker if I did so.And I thought that one of the most important questions we face is this: How can we prevent or at least reduce the horrifying number of rampage murders across the world? Let me suggest that we might best do so by thinking, and studying. A strange new sort of violence is abroad in the world. From Japan to Florida to Texas to France to Germany, Norway and Finland, we learn almost weekly of wild massacres, in which the weapon is sometimes a gun, sometimes a knife, or even a lorry. In one case the pilot of an airliner deliberately flew his craft into a hillside and slaughtered everyone on board. But the victims are always wholly innocent – and could have been us.I absolutely do not claim to know the answer to this. But I have, with the limited resources at my disposal, been following up as many of these cases as I can, way beyond the original headlines. Those easiest to follow are the major tragedies, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Nice, Orlando, Munich and Paris killings, the Anders Breivik affair and the awful care-home massacre in Japan last week. These are covered in depth. Facts emerge that do not emerge in more routine crimes, even if they are present. Let me tell you what I have found. Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma bomber, used cannabis and methamphetamine. Anders Breivik took the steroid Stanozolol and the quasi-amphetamine ephedrine. Omar Mateen, culprit of the more recent Orlando massacre, also took steroids, as did Raoul Moat, who a few years ago terrorised the North East of England. So did the remorseless David Bieber, who killed a policeman and nearly murdered two others on a rampage in Leeds in 2003.Eric Harris, one of the culprits of the Columbine school shooting, took the SSRI antidepressant Luvox. His accomplice Dylan Klebold’s medical records remain sealed, as do those of several other school killers. But we know for sure that Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake Senior High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’. So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder US President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and is now being prepared for release. So had Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who murdered all his passengers last year. The San Bernardino killers had been taking the benzodiazepine Xanax and the amphetamine Adderall. The killers of Lee Rigby were (like McVeigh) cannabis users. So was the killer of Canadian soldier Nathan Cirillo in 2014 in Ottawa (and the separate killer of another Canadian soldier elsewhere in the same year). So was Jared Loughner, culprit of a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. So was the Leytonstone Tube station knife attacker last year. So is Satoshi Uematsu, filmed grinning at Japanese TV cameras after being accused of a horrible knife rampage in a home for the disabled in Sagamihara. I know that many wish to accept the simple explanation that recent violence is solely explained by Islamic fanaticism. No doubt it’s involved. Please understand that I am not trying to excuse or exonerate terrorism when I say what follows.But when I checked the culprits of the Charlie Hebdo murders, all had drugs records or connections. The same was true of the Bataclan gang, of the Tunis beach killer and of the Thalys train terrorist. It is also true of the two young men who murdered a defenceless and aged priest near Rouen last week. One of them had also been hospitalised as a teenager for mental disorders and so almost certainly prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs. THE Nice killer had been smoking marijuana and taking mind-altering prescription drugs, almost certainly ‘antidepressants’. As an experienced Paris journalist said to me on Friday: ‘After covering all of the recent terrorist attacks here, I’d conclude that the hit-and-die killers involved all spent the vast majority of their miserable lives smoking cannabis while playing hugely violent video games.’ Now look at the German events, eclipsed by Rouen. The Ansbach suicide bomber had a string of drug offences. So did the machete killer who murdered a woman on a train in Stuttgart. The Munich shopping mall killer had spent months in a mental hospital being treated (almost certainly with drugs) for depression and anxiety.Here is my point. We know far more about these highly publicised cases than we do about most crimes. Given that mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, are present in so many of them, shouldn’t we be enquiring into the possibility that the link might be significant in a much wider number of violent killings? And, if it turns out that it is, we might be able to save many lives in future.Isn’t that worth a little thought and effort?

If,after this, you still think my aim is to excuse or apologise for Islamic extremism, then there really is nothing I can do for you.

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27 July 2017 2:55 PM

So far, the only response I have seen to the BBC’s Panorama programme on James Holmes, the Colorado mass killer, is an article in The Times of London, behind a paywall, accusing the programme of ‘scaremongering’.

She has concluded, in my view mistakenly, that the programme suggested a link between murder and the SSRI ‘antidepressants’ which Holmes was taking for some time before he killed. Nothing so simple was claimed. The programme’s title ‘Prescription for Murder?’ was carefully qualified with a question mark. I think this properly reflects its cautious and balanced editorial line.

She says, among other things (I do urge you to get hold of her article and read it) ‘There is absolutely no evidence to suggest a causal relationship between these drugs and murder.’ True enough. Causal links are extremely difficult to establish, especially in matters of the precise actions of drugs on the human mind (descriptions of changes in brain patterns and even brain shape, usually viewed externally by brain scans, are common. But these cannot by their nature establish causality, only correlation. need I remind my readers that correlation , though not necessarily not evidence of causation, is not necessarily evidence of causation either).

I do not think anyone has made such a claim. Indeed, has anyone actually established a causal link, one might justly ask, between ‘antidepressants’ and the benefits they are alleged to provide?

....such a crude link would mean hecatombs of deaths, if it were so simple. But maybe there is a wider, less dramatic problem, and horrific episodes such as this, extreme and rare as they are, are symptoms of that wider problem which should alert us to its existence and cause us to investigate.

But I am particularly interested in the Aurora case because I suspected at the time that there was a drug connection of some kind, but could not obtain hard information (which Panorama has done). When the crime under discussion was first committed in July 2012, I wrote as follows (I have emphasised some words) :

‘One curious thing has been reported about James Holmes. A car in the family’s San Diego driveway, believed to belong to his parents, bore a sticker with the words ‘To Write Love on her Arms’. This is the name of a Florida-based charity said to work on ‘issues of depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide’. Holmes was also a student of ‘neuroscience’ , a branch of knowledge often linked with the advocacy of drugs for alleged conditions such as ‘ADHD’ ‘ADD’ and ‘Clinical Depression’. But that’s all I know. I want to know more. So should you. So should my media colleagues, and the police, and those who are interested in preventing any more of these ghastly events. It might be important. And it is important to know if it is, or if it isn’t. We won’t get there by not asking. So, can someone in Colorado please ask? And keep asking?

America has always been full of easily obtained guns. But Finland isn't [NB: I have since learned that gun ownership is widespread in Finland, so this part of my argument falls] , and nor is Norway, and nor is Germany - yet these horrible events happen there too.

What's more, even in the USA mass killings of this type have become common only in modern times.

The other obvious line of enquiry is legal and illegal drugs, from steroids and antidepressants to cannabis. The culprits in these events are often found to have been taking one or more such drugs. The suspect in the Aurora shooting, pictured in court, where he looked physically ill, has been reliably reported to have been taking the prescription medicine Vicodin, which is often abused.

I might add to this the strong circumstantial evidence that Kiaran Stapleton, the terrifying young man convicted of the random murder of Indian student Anuj Bidve, is a cannabis user.’

And I should mention the appalling case of David Leeman, who shot his wife Jennie dead at close range with an (illegal) gun. An Exeter jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder after hearing evidence that he might have lost control of himself due to antidepressants he had been taking.

Yet when I call for an inquiry into this increasingly worrying correlation, I am invariably attacked angrily. Why? Because cannabis, antidepressants and steroids are now so widely taken, in some cases by quite influential people, that each drug has a powerful lobby fearful of what such an inquiry might conclude. That is all the more reason to hold that inquiry.’

I should stress here that I have said many times previously that mind-altering drugs *of all kinds*, including SSRIs, marijuana and steroids, have been taken by the perpetrators of many acts of extreme and irrational violence.

There are various lobbies who obviously don’t like me saying this, and who therefore lie that I am trying to excuse criminals, or trying to exonerate militant Islam, or whatever it is. I have no such purpose. I am, as readers here will know, a supporter of the death penalty for murder and an opponent of Islamist extremism. So these smears merely suggest to me how strong and unscrupulous are the vested interests which do not want these links investigated to see if they are significant, my only objective.

And campaigners such as http://antidepaware.co.uk/, who are without doubt strongly opinionated on the subject, but would argue they had good reason to be so, also advance many other criticisms of the drugs and their claimed effects, well short of mass murder. Most crucially, there are heavyweight doctors and researchers who have advanced powerful objections to the whole theory on which SSRI prescription is based, and who have suggested that, when fully released through Freedom of Information, drug company research does not give much support to the claims made for their effectiveness. These are best summed up in two powerful articles by the distinguished American doctor, Marcia Angell, which I repeatedly urge any interested person to read with care. They are here:

One problem for any serious criticism is that mass murders such as that in Aurora quite naturally provoke a great deal of public wrath. Suggesting that the killer is not responsible, though scientifically reasonable, is seen by the bereaved as an attempt to exonerate the individual they have come to loathe and hate. This is understandable. But do these poor people, robbed of loved one in a moment of horror, really want to block research and discovery which might prevent others from suffering the same thing, and which might also lead to serious reforms in the prescription of such drugs which might benefit many? I doubt it.

I thought the programme quite properly did not make any such definitive suggestion as has been alleged against it. It simply drew attention to the very strange history of the killer, producing a timeline of evidence about his behaviour following the prescription to him of an SSR antidepressant by a psychiatrist, and following the increasing of that prescription, and following his cessation of the drug afterwards.

Several psychiatrists (not the prescriber, who chose not to give an interview) were interviewed. They differed about the meaning of this. Their differences were fully and fairly shown. Interestingly, one psychiatrist engaged by the prosecution (but not called to give evidence) did not dismiss the idea that the drug Holmes had been taking could have affected his behaviour in ways that might have made it easier for him to kill. The doctors disagreed about whether such drugs could continue to have an effect on the user weeks after he had ceased to take them. I tend to think that the view that these effects can continue was more strongly supported by the interviewees, than the counter view that the effects disappear. One of those interviewed was Professor David Healy, and you would be well advised to read this astonishing account of what has happened to him because of his sceptical stance on the subject of SSRIs https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/may/21/internationaleducationnews.mentalhealth

Anti-depressant medication has been associated with at least 28 reports of murder, and 32 of murderous thoughts, referred to the UK medicines’ regulator in the last three decades, BBC Panorama has learned. The particular type of anti-depressants are known as SSRI, and the Medical Health Regulatory Authority says reports of an association do not necessarily mean the drugs caused the events.

Over 40 million prescriptions for SSRI anti-depressants were made to millions of patients by doctors last year in the UK. While the drugs are safe for most who take them, Panorama investigates possible links to psychosis, violence, and even murder that may affect a tiny minority.

The programme has uncovered cases of murder and extreme violence which could be linked to the taking of SSRIs, including a father who strangled his 11-year-old son and the mass killings by James Holmes in 2012 at a midnight premiere of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado.

With unique access to court documents, video evidence and experts from the prosecution and defence, reporter Shelley Jofre investigates what led 24 year old former PhD student Holmes, who had no record of violence or gun ownership, to shoot into a cinema audience killing 12 people and injuring 70. James Holmes had been prescribed sertraline, an SSRI antidepressant, for anxiety and obsessive thoughts.

Panorama scrutinises the timeline of events after he started taking the drug, and reveals how his mental health deteriorated. Analysing James Holmes' notebooks and psychiatric interviews with him carried out after the killings, Panorama shows how he appeared to lose his fear of consequences as his anxiety lifted. And as the dose of sertraline was increased, the programme shows his obsessive thoughts became psychotic.

Professor Peter Tyrer, a psychiatrist at Imperial College London, has been assessing the performance of SSRIs since they were first introduced in the 1980s. He believes the rare but extreme side effects of the drugs should be investigated further.

“You can never be quite certain with a rare side-effect whether it’s linked to a drug or not because it could be related to other things. But it’s happened just too frequently with this class of drug to make it random. It’s obviously related to the drug but we don’t know exactly why.”

UK-based psychiatrist Professor David Healy, who was an adviser to Holmes’s defence team and interviewed Holmes while he was awaiting trial, told Panorama: “I believe if he hadn’t taken the sertraline he wouldn’t have murdered anyone.”

However not everyone agrees. The court psychiatrist Dr William Reid who also interviewed Holmes before the trial, told Panorama he thought the killings were a result of mental illness and "completely unrelated to the medication."

Prosecuting Attorney George Brauchler agreed saying: “I don’t think the medications caused these shootings, I think this guy with his evil thoughts, having concluded that he had no other alternative future, with the mental illness, led to this, that’s what I think did it.”

The role of the drugs was not explored in court, and the defence team did not call on Professor Healy to give evidence.

Holmes was found guilty of all charges and is serving one of America’s longest ever prison sentences.

Professor Tyrer is calling on the courts to take into account the possible effects of SSRIs in cases where people taking the drugs commit violent crime:

"Although it makes the whole process a bit more complicated, I think that is going to become necessary in the future."

Panorama makes clear in the film, that these are very rare side effects; that the drugs are safe for the vast majority of users; and that people should not change or stop their medication without consulting their doctors.

Drugs manufacturer Pfizer who developed sertraline said a causal link between setraline and homicidal behaviour has not been established, and that the drug has helped millions of people.

Key Quotes

Background: James Holmes started taking the antidepressant, sertraline, 17 weeks before the shooting. Could the drug (known in Britain as Lustral) have played a part?

Tamara Brady, Holmes’ Defense Attorney:

It’s either certainly a coincidence or there is something there. The timing of when he took the medication, when the medication was increased and his actions, it has to cause you to wonder whether the medication didn’t play some sort of role in what he was doing.

George Brauchler, Prosecuting Attorney:

“I don’t think the medications caused these shootings, I think this guy with his evil thoughts, having concluded that he had no other alternative future, with the mental illness, led to this, that’s what I think did it.”

SJ: You don’t think the medication played any part whatsoever?

Bauchler: No, not one that is worthy of consideration for the purposes of the criminal justice system. I’ll tell you that and you know who else agrees with me? The defence team that refused to put on any evidence of that nonsense.

Prof Tyrer:

"His symptoms were exactly right for giving sertraline...but with his underlying personality, with that sort of person, it worries me a great deal when I'm prescribing....Some of the underlying predispositions can come out more strongly and in the case of Holmes these were very dangerous indeed."

Prof Tyrer:

“Many doctors find it very hard to believe that a drug which is very effective in 99.9 per cent of cases in people with depressions and phobias and obsessions could actually make someone into a mass killer”

Arlene and Bob, James’ Mother and Father, say of their son:

AH: We never saw any signs of violence or troublesome things.

BH: He was never interested in guns or really even a violent kid, that’s why it was surprising, it was that came out of nowhere

AH: Absolutely no interest in drinking or drugs, at all, ever. In retrospect I think he was too good and maybe I should have worried about the fact he was so good but as a mother you can worry about anything.

Hillary Allen, a friend of James’ from his course:

He was nice, a little bit shy at first, a little bit odd but we’re part of a group of scientists so I think everyone’s a bit odd

Hillary Allen describes texts she received from Holmes 12 days before the killing: "I remember him saying it has been manageable but the floodgates are open now. And then somewhere in there: steer clear - I am bad news."

Arlene Holmes"

"I'm so sorry this happened. It's my first thought in the morning when I wake up, frequently during the day and the middle of the night that they [the victims] can find some means or measure of comfort for how much harm was inflicted upon them. Not just the people in the theatre but all the people in Aurora, all the first responders, all the medical people.

Tamara Brady:

It's certainly caused me to think that if I, or family and friends, were prescribed an SSRI that I would make sure the doctor paid very close attention to the person they're prescribing to because I wouldn't want this adverse drug reaction to happen to anyone really, specifically to people I know."'

16 July 2017 1:06 AM

The Government won’t publish its own report into who funds Islamist extremism in this country. The Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, comically claims that she is gagging herself for reasons of national security.This is the same Government that – also in the name of national security – happily attacks civil liberty, demands the power to pry into our phone calls and emails, and searches for ‘extremists’ in schools and universities. It is the most astonishing development of the week. But more fuss was made when Ms Rudd’s hat blew off at some ceremony than was made about this sinister decision.Like almost all suppressed reports about terrorism in London or Washington DC, the truth that is being kept from us is that great danger comes from Saudi Arabia, HQ of the most fanatical and intolerant Islamism on the market.Nobody really doubts that this report, if published, would say that. The pathetic scraps of the document which Ms Rudd allowed into the open last week hinted strongly at it, for those who knew where to look. Her statement said: ‘For a small number of organisations with which there are extremism concerns, overseas funding is a significant source of income.’Hurriedly, she added: ‘However, for the vast majority of extremist groups in the UK, overseas funding is not a significant source.’ Why ‘however’? So what? If foreign funds are significant at all, that’s what we need to know. Because she also said: ‘Overseas support has allowed individuals to study at institutions that teach deeply conservative forms of Islam and provide highly socially conservative literature and preachers to the UK’s Islamic institutions. Some of these individuals have since become of extremist concern.’By ‘socially conservative’ they don’t mean me. They mean those who support the forcible shrouding of women and who froth hatred of Jews. How mealy mouthed to call it ‘conservatism’. But our Government is terrified of offending the Saudis, terrified beyond reason or self-respect.That’s why flags fly at half-mast in London when Saudi monarchs die, and why Theresa May, poor thing, had to accept the King Abdulaziz Sash last April, a decoration awarded for ‘meritorious service’ to the despotic kingdom. I look forward to seeing her wearing it.I’m a realist. I can see that we have to grovel a bit to the Saudis, because we’re not as rich and powerful as we used to be, and we need their money. But doesn’t this go too far when we suppress a report which might help us combat terrorism on our own streets, just to spare the blushes of a foreign tyranny?

Mosul... a stunning victory for hypocrisy

The only mercy in war is a swift victory. We delude ourselves if we think you can capture a defended modern city with bombs and guns without doing dreadful things. Fanatical jihadis are expert at terrorising the population of such cities, preventing them from fleeing and then using them as human shields. The shields die, in unknown thousands. So I am very glad to see the end of the battle of Mosul.Last December, I was just as relieved when the Syrian state, backed by Russian air power, crushed equally ruthless Islamist fanatics in Aleppo. But at that time I was surrounded by a media chorus accusing the Russians of terrible war crimes. I pointed out that this was a double standard. If we did the same, we would excuse it.I then asked those damning the Russians and Syrians: ‘When Mosul falls, as it will, and those who defeated IS are applauded, as they will rightly be, please think about this.’As it happens, one rather courageous voice, Amnesty International, last week produced a careful and thoughtful report, pointing out that the West and its allies had taken less care than they might have done to avoid killing innocents in Mosul. My view of this is that’s what war is like. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. What was interesting was that a British general then let fly at Amnesty. Major General Rupert Jones, the deputy commander of the international coalition against IS, said Amnesty were naive to think a huge city such as Mosul could be captured without any civilian casualties, while fighting a merciless enemy. I rather agree with him, though Amnesty’s point was that some of those deaths might have been avoided.But if a Russian general had said exactly the same about Aleppo last December, as he would have been completely entitled to do, he would have been torn to shreds as a barbaric war criminal by Western media and politicians. The old rule applies. You can’t have it both ways. Either you accept that war against such enemies is bound to have bloody results, or you don’t. But don’t justify your own unintended but cruel actions, while condemning those of others. There’s a word for that which I can’t quite think of just now.

Ignoring the killer question

Thames Valley Police got oodles of good publicity from last week’s Channel 4 film of their investigation of a crazy murder in Oxford.The ultra-violent killing of an art dealer seemed inexplicable. But today’s surveillance society, which tracks phones and cars so precisely, brought police rapidly to Michael Danaher’s door.Danaher, known to his family as a gentle giant, seemed an unlikely suspect. But he had in recent years undergone a huge personality change. He is said to have been mentally ill, and ‘depressed’.I saw what looked like a pattern. I wondered if, like so many people whose characters change utterly and who commit acts of extraordinary violence against themselves or others, he might have been taking mind-altering drugs. I believe this may be the Thalidomide scandal of the future. I constantly seek information to see if it may be true.So I asked Thames Valley Police if they had any information on this. They absolutely wouldn’t discuss it. Data protection – which hadn’t prevented them allowing a Channel 4 crew to film their investigation – somehow made it impossible.If the authorities simply can’t be bothered to be interested in this connection, how will we ever find out if it is real?

A cinematic show trial that's nothing to do with tolerance

The lights dimmed in the cinema for the advertisements, and I prepared to cram my fingers into my ears against the noise of some deafening car commercial.Instead I got a short film of a miserable middle-aged geezer sitting alone and desolate in a shadowy, unfashionable house, speaking to his absent son, who has come out as homosexual. Now he is really sorry for having ‘said some hateful things and then you left and [deep sigh] that was the worst day of my life’.‘I’m sorry, I’m proud of you for being you,’ he says, among other things. It certainly had the effect of quieting down the audience. And it made me appreciate the non-political ads which followed for their simple, ordinary crassness. As far as I’m concerned the debate about homosexuality ended ages ago and I’m not interested in it. But this mini-drama, which seemed to last about five minutes but is, in fact, only 30 seconds long, had a nasty, triumphal air about it. The man (an actor – this wasn’t a real-life story) looked to me like the defendant at a show trial, confessing his sins against Big Brother before being taken down to the cellars and shot. I’m not sure tolerance is what we’re getting here.

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04 June 2017 8:26 AM

Can we now scrap so-called sex-education and all the rest of the condom-waving and pill-pushing designed to appease and spread the permissive society?

This week we learned the amazing fact that teenage pregnancies have fallen following government cuts in spending on sex education and birth control. This is exactly the opposite of what the sex-education maniacs predicted would happen when the cuts were made.

Yes, you read that correctly. As the sex education diminished, so did the pregnancies. Nearly 20 years ago the Blair government began a multi-million-pound splurge on teen pregnancy ‘co-ordinators’, ‘sexual health clinics’ and sex classes in schools. But as it tailed off, teen pregnancies went down.

Yet the sex-ed maniacs never give up. Even as I write, a brilliantly-organised and sustained campaign is under way to make sex education universal and compulsory and to extend it to primary schools. You’d think it had been a great success.

Not so. A new look at the hard figures by Professor David Paton, of the Nottingham University Business School, and Liam Wright, of the University of Sheffield, explodes these claims. What research we have shows that sex education may increase knowledge, but does not lead to restraint.

So it is worth asking whether this mass of morally-relaxed material, in which free and easy sex is portrayed as normal, actually makes casual sex among the young more likely,

This research comes as no surprise to me. I have been getting into trouble for years for pointing out that decades of ‘harm reduction’, giveaways of contraceptive pills with no questions asked, and ever-lower age-limits, have not achieved their stated aim. The clearest signs of this have been the almost unending climb of abortion figures since the 1960s, and the epidemic of diseases such as Chlamydia.

Casual, loveless sex, , the tragedy of unwanted children, the incessant massacre of the unborn and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases have continued to grow over time.

Of course they have. The research points out that birth control will reduce the risk of pregnancy for sex acts which would have occurred anyway. But teenagers, given easier access to birth control, may be led either into starting to have sex, or having sex more frequently

Sex education did not really get going in this country until the 1950s. It began very cautiously. In 1963, the city of Norwich boosted its school sex education because the number of babies born outside marriage had risen to 7.7%, compared with 5.9% nationally. This was typical of the sort of arguments advanced at the time. Now, it is quite normal for babies to be born outside marriage, in Norwich and everywhere else. Did sex education, which generally refuses to be ‘judgemental’, and bypasses parents by handing out contraceptives to the young without their knowledge, help to make it so?

Is that, in fact, its real purpose? It was first introduced by Hungarian Communists during their brief 1919 revolution, openly aimed at undermining the morals of Roman Catholic schoolgirls. Basically they used state power so they could talk dirty to children. Its advocates here, from the 1930s onwards, have come from the radical left, with their incessant desire to interfere in people’s private lives They claimed that parents could not do the job properly. Well, the schools do it a lot worse, as we plainly see.

It is time that the sex education lobby was subjected to some serious questioning about what its true aim is, and whether it is any good at what it does. Who in British politics will dare challenge these grim-jawed zealots, who march onwards even when the facts are against them?

A bad dose of Christian-bashing

Channel Four has won much modish praise for screening the laughable anti-Christian fantasy ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, starring a gloriously sulky and smug Elisabeth Moss.

This drama started life as a heavy-handed novel by a politically-correct Canadian, Margaret Atwood.

In her fable, fanatical evangelical Christians take over the USA, and turn it into a tyranny in which they enslave fertile women, raping them once a month in the presence of their wives.

This has not actually happened at all since Ms Atwood wrote her cult book 32 years ago, despite there being lots of evangelical Christians in the USA, and it seems pretty unlikely to take place. Perhaps this is because evangelical Christians aren’t actually like this.

In an embarrassing and lengthy scene in the first episode, the heroine is duly raped. Just in case any of us didn’t get the message, the crime takes place to the background of church organ music, gradually swelling into the sound of a full choir singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.

In case any viewers still don’t understand the point (Christians are bad!), the rapist reads chunks out of the Bible as he proceeds.

As usual, I await a similar drama from Channel Four or any other major TV station, in which Muslims, who have actually set up a state in which women are subjugated, forced to wear demeaning clothing and are enslaved sexually, are portrayed as critically as Christians always are by our new cultural elite.

I repeat a warning I’ve given before. Those who seek to drive Christianity out of our society may be unpleasantly surprised when they find out what actually replaces it.

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The thing I will always remember about the Panamanian despot Manuel Noriega is that he was driven out of the embassy where he’d sought sanctuary by loud rock music.

It was a brilliant tactic, of course. But it was also an admission that loud rock music is an offensive weapon, and a means of torture. Since then it has often been used as such. And those councils which this summer greedily license rock concerts in parks anywhere near people’s homes should be reminded of that. Nobody’s pleasure is important enough to justify ruining someone else’s peace.

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I no longer believe there’s a ‘silent majority’ of patriotic conservatives. Decades of comprehensive schooling have done their work, and a squidgy emotive leftism is the default position of most people under 45. So I’m not surprised or dismayed by the audience on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’.

These audiences are also picked from people who are interested in politics, who are mostly activists and mostly leftist. The audience on Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’, who aren’t selected, are much less predictable.

Even so, this story is interesting. A Tory businessman, David Stoneman, tells me that he tried for years to be part of the QT audience. He filled in the online forms with commendable honesty. He was never asked on. But then he decided to be naughty. He passed himself off as a militant trade unionist train-driver who backed the Leave campaign and opposed fracking. Almost immediately, the people who assemble the QT audiences were in touch wanting to know more. Alas, his nerve failed him and he didn’t go through with it. Quite right too, I suppose. We wouldn’t want people gaming the system.

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I thought Jeremy Corbyn’s interview of Jeremy Paxman went quite well the other night. The bearded oldster shouldn’t have interrupted the very important Great Paxo quite so much, but Mr Corbyn, grandfatherly old Sinn Fein sympathiser that he is, definitely has a future as a TV personality if other possibilities don’t work out.

It’s evidence, not proof, but given the grave shortage of hard evidence of any kind, it is surely interesting to anyone interested in these matters. Yet it has attracted very little attention. I thought I would give it a bit more.

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01 February 2017 1:17 PM

In another very different context, my late brother once recalled William Butler Yeats's alarming poem 'The Man and the Echo' . The poet, beloved by many Irish nationalists at the time of the rebellion against British rule, feared that his words might have led others into doing terrible things.

‘All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great strain

On that woman’s reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have checked

That whereby a house lay wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and die.’

My brother was dismayed and in some turmoil because a brave and idealistic young American, inspired by his writing and speaking, had volunteered for war in Iraq and been killed fighting. Of course this appears at first to be a great compliment to the power of his tongue and pen, and indeed in a way it is. But it is also a great burden.

I do not envy him the responsibility. I have myself said (quoting a fine prayer written by the late Eric Milner-White) that those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say. I know that people pay more attention to me than I might think justified, as I am no more than a jobbing scribbler, not a guru, priest or philosopher.

I sometimes receive touching and moving letters from people who tell me that something I have written or said has helped them to an understanding of the world. I tend to think that I have merely crystallised their own thoughts. The most enjoyable books, in my experience, are the ones which tell you what you already knew, but more clearly than you knew it. It is seductive, and helps the reader to be more articulate. But very few people want to read polemics by those they profoundly disagree with in the first place. To change your mind, you have to want to do so. Most don’t.

That is one of the reasons why, when I have time for serious reading, I read history above all things, which is full of things I didn’t know and constantly forces me to revise my position. It’s also why I try to cram my books with facts that will surprise readers. My books are of course arguments, but they would be worthless in my view if they were not also factual.

These days, now I have given up political engagement, I am not sure I would want my words to have any effect on anyone, apart from to make them feel they understand their place in the cosmos better. I think this is good in itself. The unexamined life isn’t worth living, and we cannot (as Jeannette Winterson rightly says in her book ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?) just be animals, contented with satisfying our basic material appetites.

We are so much more than this, potentially, that to be no more than consumers and pleasure seekers is to do ourselves actual damage. A proper life requires some understanding of who we are and why we might be here, which is why the almost total collapse of Christian belief and worship has left so many, especially among the poor, with empty lives without purpose or world-view. They also lack the literary impulse provided by the Authorised Version of the Bible, which clothed simple, powerful thoughts in beauty and gave the English-speaking peoples the language of glory and poetry, now lost.

This is a long way round to my point, which is that the main suspect in the Quebec Mosque killing on Sunday night, Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, has named me as one of his ‘likes’ on his Facebook page. This has now been shut down but I believe an archived version can still be found by the diligent.

As the Canadian justice system is very similar to the English one, I am rightly constrained in what I say about the accused. I shall wait for the trial and for sworn evidence, and for the jury’s verdict, before discussing the case itself.

But I cannot think of anything I have written or said which might have impelled anyone to do the act of which Mr Bissonnette now stands accused.

I might add that among his other ‘likes’ are Mme Marine le Pen, the French Front National leader, my late brother Christopher and the atheist author Richard Dawkins.

I think this is an eclectic list on which almost anyone might find himself or herself. But as some people on Twitter have taken the trouble to point out (how kind of them!) that Mr Bissonnette named me on his Facebook account, I felt I should respond. For the moment, this is all I can say. Perhaps there will be more once the matter has been tried before a jury.

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30 January 2017 12:52 PM

I grow more and more baffled by the priorities of the news world. Last week the chief of Britain’s electronic spying agency, GCHQ, quit without warning or adequate reason. Robert Hannigan, we were briefly told, left his ultra-sensitive £160,000-a- year post after just two years for ‘personal reasons’ . Mr Hannigan is 51 and has previously worked as ‘director general of defence and intelligence’ at the Foreign Office. He can hardly have expected the GCHQ job to allow him to spend a lot of time at home with his family. One has to suspect a controversy. (***NOTE: On Monday 30th January Charles Moore in his Daily Telegraph column said Mr Hannigan had retired because of a 'family illness'. I have not seen any other reference to this, and was not aware of it when I wrote the article. PH***)

But far more has been written in the British press about the departure of Alexandra Shulman as editor of Vogue than about the departure of Robert Hannigan as boss of GCHQ.

Now we are all in a tizz about President Trump’s (frankly bizarre) executive orders about immigration.

Just because a lot of squeaky liberals are against these measures, it does not mean they are sensible or right. Indeed, this must be the wise person’s motto in dealing with all controversies of the Trump presidency.

As someone who has for some time openly expressed doubts about the virtue of universal suffrage democracy, and suggested ways by which it could be moderated, I am stuck in a paradox.

The people who are now most appalled by the effects of that universal suffrage democracy are exactly the same people who used to gasp or mutter ‘fascist’ when I suggested that it might have risks.

Yet here I am, annoying my own supporters by refusing to support or take part in the EU referendum, and expressing doubts about the outcome; and also annoying some of my regular readers by failing to fall in love with Mr Trump.

It isn’t Mr Trump’s politics that put me off. There’s no point telling me that he has been sound on some topic or other where we seem to share a view. I don’t think he really has any politics, apart from a vague and ill-thought-out opposition to free trade. That’s why I am not specially heartened by the occasional sensible things he has said (and now retracted or forgotten) about Russia and NATO. I suspected, and events have so far proved me right, that the foreign policy establishment would rapidly turn him into a reliable Natopolitan, gargling on about the need to defend Europe from a non-existent Russian threat.

He is learning what his minders will put up with, and what they won’t. He managed to tame himself quite effectively during Mrs May’s visit, which I think will come to be seen as a premature mistake, over time.

His cautious behaviour was presumably caused by his desire to spend a night in Buckingham Palace and have his picture taken with the Queen. He is, I think, in the White House as a rather grand souvenir-collector (he keeps the lunch-menus, we learned at the weekend) . I have long thought that when he has got enough such souvenirs, he will leave, and so become the first President to resign the office voluntarily.

The NATO issue was resolved because it really matters to his minders and doesn’t really matter to him. He’d like to have people tortured . He’s probably seen ‘Jack Bauer’ on the TV in ‘24’ saving America by torturing people. He may even get his ‘ideas’ from such shows) . His occasional escapes over the White House wall will in future be on other subjects, as we saw on Saturday. He can do damage, but as long as he does not upset the juggernaut of continuing policy, they can put up with quite a bit of this.

NATO *is* obsolete. A child could see it. You might as well maintain an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian Empire as maintain an alliance against the Soviet Union. Both have vanished, and their successor states bear no relation to the empires they once ruled.

Worse, an alliance against Russia, which in 1991 withdrew into the narrowest borders it could possibly tolerate, has to be aggressive, not defensive. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in ‘Time’ magazine, is plainly greatly alarmed, saying : ‘Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defence doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.’ Mr Gorbachev is one of the last really big people alive in world politics. If he thinks so, it’s worth worrying.

NATO’s chief virtue was that it was unarguably defensive. Now it is an aggressive body, promoting the very tension it claims to soothe, like a quack doctor keeping his patient ill to ensure that he carries on buying the expensive drugs he sells, and attending the costly appointments.

But Mr Trump has now clearly given up his childishly clear vision, and his sensible view that it is obsolete, , and become one of the conformist grown-ups, believing and repeating the official untruth. The Emperor has a very fine suit of clothes, after all. I’ve long thought and said the Andersen story about the Emperor’s clothes ended misleadingly. In real life the little boy and his family would have been attacked by the crowd, arrested, tortured and then (when the bruises had faded), paraded to confirm that the Emperor’s new clothes were very fine indeed, before being exiled to some pig-farm.

Now we get this stuff about banning Muslims. My response? It just isn’t serious, even though it affects quite a lot of individuals very seriously indeed. I am hilariously accused on this blog of being in some unexplained way a sympathiser with Islam, and no doubt what I say now will thicken and deepen this particular stream of ignorant, stupid drivel. My actual position is that ,if the ‘west’ really wishes to limit the influence of Islam over its societies, it needs to rediscover the Christian faith in a big way. And that crude, ignorant attacks on Muslims themselves naturally make any intelligent open-minded person come to their defence when he can, whatever he thinks of their faith.

And as long as the ‘west’ doesn’t rediscover Christianity, it flails dangerously about, mistaking strength and wealth for virtue. It puts its faith in reeking tube and iron shard, in bigger weapons, and in ‘tougher’ ‘securidee’ (which bears the same relation to true security as does ‘charidee’ to true charity), in consumer goods and in its own luxurious hedonism. This will not work. As I’ve said before, when George W. Bush used to say that Muslim militants ‘hate our way of life’, I could not forebear to chime in ‘But I also hate our way of life!’.

For I do. The ‘West’ only exists as a coherent part of the world because of the Christian morals, and the extremely high levels of trust and lawfulness based upon them, which allowed Europe and the Anglosphere to develop as they have. Islam has virtues (they have much, for instance, to teach us about hospitality and the care of the old). But Islamic societies have simply not managed to achieve levels of trust and law comparable to those in Christian lands. This could explain why Islam (if you discount oil) has not achieved any great economic success, why education, publishing, freedom of speech and thought do not greatly flourish under its influence - and I am sceptical of claims of Islamic paradises in the distant past.

But our advantages, like our infrastructure and our other stores of wealth, material and moral, are inherited. We are not replenishing them. We are wearing them out. We have drawn heavily on our balances and obtained a great deal of moral and political credit on the basis of a reputation won by others which we no longer deserve.

In military terms, our scientific advances have stalled, if not gone backwards. Modern TV techniques combined with the methods of ‘people power’ which are increasingly the main weapon in international conflict, have completely (for example) neutralised Israel’s former military superiority over her neighbours. In Iraq and Libya we merely demonstrated that superior physical force can destroy but not create. Russia’s genius in Syria was to use its superior weaponry *alongside* an existing polity which could make good use of airpower. Our stupidity in Libya was to lend our airpower to the forces of anarchy, who knew what they didn’t want but had no ability to take advantage of the victory we gave them.

I see no sign that Mr Trump, or anyone else in Washington or London, has yet understood this. His wild pledge to eradicate Islamist terror from the earth, at his inauguration, was actively alarming. How can any mentally coherent person make such boasts? But it is dispiritingly similar to the rhetorical ‘we will find these cowards and punish them’ view emitted by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, and British leaders, not to mention the French - now living under an absurd and futile state of emergency which shows every sign of becoming permanent.

Since Mr Trump so famously doesn’t read, can someone arrange for him to have a late-night viewing of Gille Pontecorvo’s brilliant, rending film (based on researched facts and thinly fictionalised) about terror, counter-terror, torture and propaganda ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Maybe he’ll miss the point. But perhaps he might get it, see what might be wrong with the Jack Bauer view of life, and so save us all a lot of trouble.

He is plainly listening to some establishment voices, even while appearing to be off the leash. This does not mean he is prepared to be sensible for its own sake (his Russian opinions, as discussed, were more sensible than those of the establishment), just that he will listen to others when the issue isn’t especially dear to his heart. As he revealed his chaotic, illogical and foolish ‘extreme vetting’ plan, Mr Trump mentioned the September 11 2001 attacks as its ultimate justification. But most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. All of these are Arab countries with which the USA maintains close military and political relations. But none of these countries was on Mr Trump’s list, which did by contrast contain Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. You got a sense of someone saying ‘OK, have your stupid immigration ban, if you must, as long as you don’t annoy these people while you’re doing it’.

Then there’s the question of whether Mr Trump should be a guest of the Queen. I find it hard to see a principle at stake here. Her Majesty has had to spend time with Martin McGuinness, with the appalling old waxworks who run China, with the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, with Robert Mugabe (and plenty of other horrors who attend Commonwealth conferences). But I think it might be wise to set the visit quite a long way off, so that we have some leverage. Mr Trump will understand that. It is Britain’s biggest asset in any bargain with Mr Trump, he really wants it, and it should not be given away until we can be quite sure we will get something in return.

Meanwhile I think events have so far shown that Mr Trump is pretty much as bad as he looked, but will moderate and restrain his behaviour whenever the issue at stake doesn’t really bother him. Not much to rejoice about but ,hey, this wasn’t my idea.